Today, we host a mini-interview with Fink's project leader, Max Horn. The Fink project wants to bring the full world of Unix Open Source software to Darwin and Mac OS X. They modify Unix software so that it compiles and runs on Mac OS X and make it available for download as a coherent distribution. Fink uses Debian tools like dpkg and apt-get to provide powerful binary package management and you can choose whether you want to download precompiled binary packages or build everything from source.

I asked myself the same question a while ago when DarwinPorts was announced last year. Short answer, Fink is GNU-based - DarwinPorts is BSD-based. Both kids play nice in the sandbox known as your Mac. Package maintainers from both 'Distros' work together to get past difficulties in porting to Darwin/OSX, and that's where the collaboration is important. Some maintainers commit to both projects, actually.